This post was started several times over the past four months but was regularly abandoned over the maintenance required to plug in all the links. It was almost aborted entirely in the wake of the week of September 11th, when nostalgia for the way New York used to be reached fever pitch. But since I started it, I figured I might as well finish it. So, here goes. We’ll see if I bring it to fruition this time.
If you’e anything of a regular reader, you might pick up on my frequent allusions to having interned at SPIN Magazine back in the balmy, comparatively carefree days of 1989 (that all started on this post). While entirely true, it should be noted that in the grand scheme of things, I was only at the magazine in its then-grotty office on West 18th Street from about July 1989 until January of 1990, when the managing editor who’d implied that he was going to hire me on full-time was fired. Overall, my tenure at SPIN — while certainly informative for me — didn’t really make too much of an impression on the magazine itself. While formally toiling paylessly under its auspices, I contributed one small news item about Public Enemy. Big whoop.
But prior to my short-lived, star-crossed few months at SPIN, the magazine had been hugely influential on me. I remember picking up its third issue (with Sting on the cover) in July of 1985 under the misapprehension that there was a feature on one of my then-favorite bands, 7 Seconds (there wasn’t), but becoming totally hooked anyway. Unlike shitty Rolling Stone, here was a magazine that dared to discuss and review bands like Scratch Acid, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the Sisters of Mercy, Squirrel Bait, the nascent Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers. The writing was assertive and irreverent. Their approach was fresh and different — they had Pia Zadora interview Joey Ramone and Lydia Lunch interview Pat Benatar. They periodically gave Henry Rollins the back page to talk about his impressions of Madonna or wax rhapsodic about his then-two favorite records (White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Funhouse by The Stooges). It was amazing stuff, and for many years afterwards, I was a dutifully loyal reader, even after my brief internship.
In time, SPIN started …er…spiraling, shedding long-time staffers left and right and eventually even jettisoning its longtime editor-in-chief and founder, Bob “The Gooch” Guccione Jr. The magazine lost whatever voice and edge it once had and started following the curve as opposed to staying ahead of it. While everyone I’d originally known from my intern days were long gone, certain other people I’d worked alongside from various other outlets came and went through the outlet’s perpetually revolving door. The last physical issue came out on 2012 before it became a strictly online affair.
Here in 2021, the online iteration of SPIN admirably strives to compete in a vastly different landscape from the one it first launched in, but I don’t know anyone who writes for or edits it anymore, as far as I know. I cannot say that I read it often enough to have a credible opinion about whether or not it’s worth checking out, these days, but I somehow doubt that it pushes any envelopes in the way it used to do.
In any case, blah blah blah …. enough of about me and my experience at SPIN. This post ostensibly had nothing to do with all that, but I’m so damn narcissistic that I couldn’t help dredging all that bullshit back up. No, this post was about how friggin’ anaemic much of SPIN’s more recent ….. or, Hell, not even that recent ... content has been.
What triggered it was a listicle they first posted in 2013 called “The 40 Best New York City Music Videos.” Longtime readers know I used to spend an inordinate amount of time and bandwidth documenting same, so I was of course curious to learn which ones made their list. Somewhat predictably, said list was both rife with cliché and pandered strenuously to certain demographics, although still somehow managed to omit some truly obvious choices like, say, “Waiting on a Friend” by ye olde Rolling Stones. I was, of course, appalled, and planned to compose my own, authoritative list to combat SPIN's blinkered myopia at once.
The trouble was, as mentioned earlier, while I had a fever for the subject matter (however ridiculous), it was going to be a labor-intensive post … all that cutting and pasting of links and whatnot. I kept a running list of clips I thought were worthy of citing, and that seemed to stretch on for days. I’d be out running an errand and something I’d see would remind me of, say, the video of “We Want the Airwaves” by the Ramones (shot on Joey’s rooftop on East 9th Street) or the slow trek through Chinatown in “Coming Down” by the Dum Dum Girls. After a while, the list got pretty long, if not unwieldy, completely dwarfing SPIN’s pathetic list of 40.
But when the task seemed too laborious, I set it to one side and then got back to my life, only to fleetingly invoke it a little while back in this post. It seems laughably unlikely, but perhaps SPIN spotted my invocation of it, because now when you go to their link, all that remains is their one-paragraph preamble. Their list is strangely gone.
So, when you go through my list and wonder where, say, “Love is Strong” by the Rolling Stones, "New York, New York" by Ryan Adams, “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson and/or, good lord, “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are, know that I left them out because they were on SPIN’s list, and I didn’t want to be duplicative. Also, “Empire State of Mind” completely fucking sucks and makes me want to destroy the earth.
Here’s my list. Enjoy it or not. I did it alphabetically by song title. There is no hierarchy, although, personally speaking, I like some of these way, way more than others.
ADDENDUM: Some new clips were added on Tuesday, October 12 and Wednesday, October 13.
“All or Nothin” by Madball - Tompkins Square Park, East Village, Lower East Side
"Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants - Randall's Island
“Big Apple” by Kajagoogoo - SoHo, Delancey Street, West 4th Street subway platform, Midtown, West Side Highway
“Brainwashed” by Nuclear Assault - Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Bridge, Greenwich Village
“Burn Trees” by Missing Foundation - East Village, Tompkins Square Park, Lower East Side
“Carnival” by Natalie Merchant - Midtown, 8th Avenue, Tompkins Square Park, Coney Island
“Confusion” by New Order - Fun House disco in Chelsea
“Cosmic Slop” by Funkadelic - Central Park, Times Square
“Cousins” by Vampire Weekend - Cortlandt Alley, TriBeca
“Crazy” by Au Revoir, SImone - An homage to "After Hours," SoHo
“Disconnect” by The Rollins Band - Ah homage to "Taxi Driver," Hell's Kitchen
“Dunes” by The Clean - Midtown, NoHo, Greenwich Village, The Bowery, Hoboken
“Edie (Ciao Baby)” by The Cult - Wall Street, Chelsea, CBGB, Hell's Kitchen, Time's Square, Central Park, Brookyn
“Electric Relaxation” by A Tribe Called Quest - Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Bridge, Midtown, Square Diner in TriBeCa
“Forever” by Little Steven & The Disciples of Soul - Times Square, Greenwich Village, St. Marks Place, Midtown
“Fanky” by Charly Garcia - SoHo, Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, East River Park
“Funky Man” by Dee Dee King - East Village, Washington Square Park, the Gas Station on Avenue B
“Half Asleep” by School of Seven Bells - Union Square, Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park
"Hot, Hot, Hot" by Buster Poindexter - FDR Drive, Lower East Side, Chinatown, Times Square
“HTP-Brid” by Savages - Subways, High Line, East Village
“Judas Kiss” by The Del Lords - East Village, Lower East Side
“Jump Around” by House of Pain - Mott Street in SoHo, Old Town Bar & Grill near Union Square, Midtown, Upper East Side
“Manhattan” by Cat Power - All over Manhattan (duh!)
"Mind Games" by John Lennon - Central Park, Midtown
“My Kinda Town” by The Undead - World Trade Center, Times Square, Medical Corridor, East Village
"New York City" by Joey Ramone - Lower East Side, East Village, The Bowery, Chinatown, Cortlandt Alley, TriBeCa, Times Square, Midtown, Central Park, West Village, Flushing, Queens, Brooklyn Bridge, Civic Center
“Off the A-List” by Surgery - East Village, Gramercy Park, Midtown, Lower East Side
“Policy of Truth” by Depeche Mode - The reservoir in Central Park, East River Park, Meat Packing District, Upper West Side
”Potential for a Fall” by Sick of It All - East Village, Tompkins Square Park, Meat Packing District, West Side Highway, Chelsea
“Rocks Off” by The Rolling Stones - The Bowery
“Rollercoaster” by Everything But The Girl - Greenwich Village, Union Square, NoHo
“Run and Run” by The Psychedelic Furs - Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park, East Village, SoHo, Battery Park
"Spider-Man" by The Ramones - Roof of 108 Leonard Street, TriBeCa
“Star” by The Cult - Midtown, Lower East Side
"Step" by Vampire Weekend - All over Manhattan
“Sun City” by Artists Against Apartheid - Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, Lower East Side
“Swimming in 99” by Golden Suits - Brooklyn, TriBeCa, SoHo, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Central Park
"Todd Youth" by Jesse Malin - East Village, Tompkins Square Park
“Too Many Creeps” by the Bush Tetras - The Bowery, East Village, Lower East Side
"Trapped" by the Crumbsuckers - CBGB, The Bowery
“Union City Blue” by Blondie - Manhattan from the Jersey side of the Hudson River
"Vices" by Circus of Power - Pier 25, West Side Highway
"World Order in New York" by World Order - Central Park, Midtown, Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, Wall Street, Williamsburg, The Dakota, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park, Flushing Corona Park, Queens,
What am I missing?
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